XnView Software

Hello, this is my first post. I have been using XnView since last year and find it very useful for organising, tagging, and annotating photos.

I am just finding that my XnView database is now larger than my mail store, using 20% of my hard drive, and am wondering what I can do to prune it, and in general, what kind of management is good.

Are there standard settings for xnView that are good for keeping the database size down? Or vice versa, what tends to increase the database size?

dglp wrote:Hello, this is my first post. I have been using XnView since last year and find it very useful for organising, tagging, and annotating photos.

I am just finding that my XnView database is now larger than my mail store, using 20% of my hard drive, and am wondering what I can do to prune it, and in general, what kind of management is good.

Are there standard settings for xnView that are good for keeping the database size down? Or vice versa, what tends to increase the database size?

One fairly easy way of decreasing the size is to adjust the compression type of the thumbnails. As default XnView uses "Lossless (ZIP)" (or was it "None"?). If you can live with somewhat lower quality of the thumbs you will save lots of disk space. Personally I use "Low quality (JPEG)" which is more than enought IMO. Please note that XnView will rebuild all thumbnails after changing this option when browsing though you images. This can take quite some time if you have great amounts of images.

You'll find the options to change the compression in:
Options -> Browser -> Thumbnails -> Cache.

You can also try to click the "Optimize" button, which if I understand correct will clean up your database, ergo use less disk space.

Thanks Troken. I'll try that.
I also notice that the cache seems to permit a choice of location. If I can move it to a networked hard drive that would be even better!

That possiblity raises anotehr question: If I have several machines on a network, can I install XnView on each and have them share one database?

Troken wrote:One fairly easy way of decreasing the size is to adjust the compression type of the thumbnails.

dglp wrote:Thanks Troken. I'll try that.
I also notice that the cache seems to permit a choice of location. If I can move it to a networked hard drive that would be even better!

That possiblity raises anotehr question: If I have several machines on a network, can I install XnView on each and have them share one database?

Hm... I really dont know, but I'm sure other users of this forum knows the answer. Sounds like an interesting idea though.

One more way of decreasing database size should simply be to use smaller thumbnails.

dglp wrote:That possiblity raises anotehr question: If I have several machines on a network, can I install XnView on each and have them share one database?

Related discussions:

• external HD archive (multiple PCs)
• Store Thumbnails database in photos folder

I see another problem here, don't know if this has been discussed before. The database gets blown up and fragmented all the time because there is one important feature missing (IMHO) - to be able to switch off caching, but still use the current database.

This way I would have full control, would have all my photo folders in the cache, but not all the other temporarily viewed files (and this happens in many places with many pics that are moved around or deleted or whatever, all the time).

Since a while I'm looking for a software which is more than a viewer. I want to really manage my photos in a way that

• I can tag them (already solved in xnview, as I understood),
  I can archive it on external or offline media like CD, DVD, HDD
  I can retrieve appropriate photos by starting questions like: Please give me all photos since 1988, containing the tags SUNSET, BEACH, and HAWAII

The result will be given in a list (preferebly with thumbnail) like

• IMG-1234 in dir f:/photo/1998/...
  IMG-4567 on DVD volume ARCHIVE2001, dir:.../2001/March/...
  IMG-9876 on COMPUTERXYZ/PHOTOS/usr/photos/2005/...

Has xnview features like that. If not, will it be feasable to perform such scenarios in combination with additional software (which s/w)?
Thanks for any hints and suggestions

Derek